Administration and adjudication of the W Prize is handled by the Referees Committee. Each member has a long-standing background in legged robots and automated systems.

Tad McGeer trained as an aeronautical engineer at Princeton and Stanford, and then joined the new Engineering Science faculty at Simon Fraser University in his native British Columbia. There he developed the concept of passive dynamic walking, which went on to be adopted as a paradigm for study of human locomotion and design of legged robots. In 1990 he returned to aeronautics, joining a Virginia start-up, Aurora Flight Sciences, as Chief Scientist. He headed early design studies on the Perseus and Theseusunmanned research aircraft, and then proposed the Aerosonde miniature aircraft concept for long-range weather reconnaissance. This led to founding of the

Ivan Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his Master's degree from Caltech, and his PhD from MIT in 1963. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering ands the National Academy of Sciences. He was the inventor of Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. For his invention of Sketchpad and related work, Sutherland received the Turing Award in 1988. From 1966 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard. With the help of his student Bob Sproull he created what is widely

considered to be the first Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) Head Mounted Display (HMD) system in 1968. He then co-founded Evans and Sutherland, which went on to do pioneering work in the field of fight simulation, real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at Caltech, where he was the founding head of the Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, where among other things he developed a man-carrying hexapod in the early 1980s. The company was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1990 to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Dr Sutherland is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2007).